Shannon Greywalker's Blog

Think about your typical staff meetings and planning meetings, where there are problems to be solved and the entire group is solicited for ideas about how to solve those problems. What usually happens is that some people need no encouragement to throw out lots of ideas–to the point of seeming to overtake the meeting. Other people stay relatively quiet and might say very little, or even need to be asked “what do you think?” before they say anything at all. This common group decision making dynamic isn’t because the more quiet people lack plenty of ideas they could contribute. Instead, it’s due to the communication gap between high- and low-context communicators.

What’s happening is that the low-context communicators feel perfectly comfortable throwing out their ideas and observations at every opportunity, expecting everyone else to jump in with their ideas too. Like the players on a soccer field, every low-context communicator is actively trying to control the ball and collectively move it up the field towards a goal (concensus). If the ball gets taken from you, that’s no problem; it’s part of the game and part of the fun.

By contrast, the high-context communicators prefer to play ball by having a leader throw the ball to one person, who throws it to the next, etc. until everyone’s had equal turns and eventually the chain of ball-passing gets the ball to the goal. In other words, high-context communicators don’t feel comfortable jumping into the fray and trying to grab the ball for a while; they feel that’s too combative. Instead, they are usually waiting to be invited to contribute their ideas.

Now that I’ve been intensively learning about agile planning and estimating techniques, it strikes me that agile planning games, such as planning poker, provide an excellent technique to bridge this divide between high- and low-context communicators, resulting in greater input from the high-context team members (and fewer feelings of “not being heard” or “not being able to get a word in”). Agile planning games can also make your meetings go much faster by removing all extra discussion that isn’t really about the decisions you’re trying to make but is really about the low-context and high-context communicators attempting to help each other see what they’re trying to say.

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Now for the fun part: the preceding paragraph is where I’d end this post if I were a high-context communicator. What I’ve said so far assumes that you know what high- and low-context communication is, that you know how agile estimating/planning games work, especially planning poker. And most importantly, it assumes that you consider me enough of an expert that I don’t need to elaborate or explain my assertions.

My post up to “…the fun part” is also typically how high-context communicators contribute their reasoning and observations in a planning meeting of any sort. As you’ll see if you continue reading, high-context communicators tend to make a lot of assumptions that can leave low-context communicators fumbling in the dark. The rest of this post is for the low-context communicators, and also for the high-context communicators who might not actually be familiar with the domains of agile development or high/low context communication, or who might not perceive me as an expert who knows what I’m talking about. ^.^

Some readers might be familiar with the concept of high-context cultures and low-context cultures and the challenges of effective communication and collaboration when your teams comprise members from both types of culture. At my previous employer, where offshoring to India was all the rage for a time period, the mandatory classes on working effectively with Indian team members went into great detail about the inherent challenges in collaborating without offending them with a typically American direct communication style, and how it would be difficult to get suggestions for improvement or straight answers about project status on their end for a variety of reasons centering around matters of status and hierarchical relationships.

But in the past few years I’ve been learning that a similar high-context versus low-context divide exists within American culture too. And unfortunately, this divide can hamper group decision making to a significant degree, especially in the format of typical non-structured meetings so common in the American business environment. As I’ve become aware of this communication dynamic, I’ve attempted to bridge the divide with varied success (and failure!) over the years, but the collaborative decision-making techniques used in agile development that were demonstrated last week during my company’s Scrum training opened my eyes to the fact that with the right techniques, you can effectively work around the inherent challenges of getting high-context and low-context communicators to make decisions together.

If you’re not familiar with high-context versus low-context communication styles, here is a whirlwind summary:

Some extreme examples of the difference between high-context and low-context communicators:

• In a high-context culture, it would be rude or offensive to ask a person directly “what do you want?” They would expect you to have already thought it through and to have done your homework about that person and their desires before engaging in communication about the subject. Conversely, high-context communicators assume that because you should already know everything about the subject being discussed, they don’t need to recap any details or work out any decisions with you. For example, in high-context cultures, meetings are essentially an official “ceremony” where the already commonly-agreed decisions are announced. The decisions were already arrived at through numerous back-channels before the meeting.
• A high-context listener can get the involuntary impression that the low-context speaker thinks they are stupid because the low-context speaker starts explaining everything. Conversely, because high-context speakers don’t explain everything, low-context listeners can feel like the the speaker is jumping to conclusions or making non sequitur statements.
• A teacher is late to class regularly in a high context culture. The director of the school asks a teacher’s friend about the teacher’s health and happiness, and indicates that the teacher’s late arrival for class might have been a sign that something was wrong. When the friend conveys the director’s concern to the teacher, the teacher knows exactly what the director meant and is never late for class again.
• A low-context business executive might say “let’s make a deal”, and the high-context manager might reply “Is your son interested in learning about your widget business?”

So these are commonly understood differences between high-context and low-context cultures, but let’s look deeper at how these same important differences exist within a given culture. Especially in America, which is a melting pot of cultures. I can make the following sweeping generalizations about American culture that I feel are accurate. If any of these seem inaccurate to you or you cannot personally identify with these, remember that there’s plenty of wiggle room for individuals to be different from the norm described by a generalization:

• The male gender tends to have more low-context communicators
• The female gender tends to have more high-context communicators
• Engineering and musician types tend to have more low-context communicators
• Sales, marketing, product management, and executive functional management types tend to have more high-context communicators
• People raised in secular or non-hierarchical subcultures tend to have more low-context communicators
• People raised in fundamentalist or hierarchical subcultures tend to have more high-context communicators

For example, I’m a male engineering type raised in a secular subculture and I’m extremely low-context. My wife jokes that I border on the verge of Asperger Syndrome when I’m in focus mode on any task, and she has lived closely in the past with a person who had clinical Asperger Syndrome. When I’m not in focus mode, I can spare more mental bandwidth to what I call “my social circuitry” and be more aware of receiving and giving non-verbal cues.

My wife, by contrast, was raised in a fundamentalist and hierarchical subculture and she’s extremely high-context. In her upbringing, it was a critical survival skill to intuit exactly what a person was really saying, because the actual words could not be trusted at all. When we have misunderstandings, the root cause is very often because we sit on opposite ends of the spectrum between high-context and low-context communication styles. In these situations, I’m not giving her enough contextual cues and wonder why she doesn’t take me at my word, while she’s expecting me to intuit all her contextual cues and wonders why I’m taking her words literally and not seeing what she’s really saying. Does this sound familiar? Have you ever run into this type of communication gap in your close relationships?

The problem is that this communication gap happens in the workplace too, but it can be harder to see it because we all work under a veneer of professionalism and try to stay focused on business goals and status reporting in most of our workplace communication.

Agile planning techniques like planning poker are great at leveling the field between the high-context and low-context communicators. When you bring a group together to estimate how long a complex task might take, or what the best course of action might be, what typically happens in unstructured meetings is that the person who knows the most about the subject (or thinks they do) blurts out an estimate or idea, and that action instantly colors what everyone else might have been planning to say. Especially if the first person to jump into the fray is considered a thought leader by the group.

In a technique like planning poker, however, nobody is allowed to go first, and everybody is invited to give their opinion. When the entire group has finally placed their cards face down on the table, all cards are revealed at the same time. The two people who gave the highest and lowest estimates are invited to briefly help the group understand their reasoning. Total discussion is usually limited to two minutes, after which the discussion is stopped and everyone does another round of face-down estimates, which are revealed at the same time again. This process continues until the estimates converge on a number that nobody strongly objects to. Usually, this takes no more than three rounds and two 2-minute discussion periods.

Why this works to arrive at group concensus so quickly is rooted partly in the fact that the low-context communicators are reined-in: they’re not allowed to blurt out (rush in and take control of the ball), and the only people invited to talk the most are the two people with the outlying highest and lowest values. Finally, discussion is limited to two minutes per round, so there’s more pressure to keep your comments short and not elaborate with endless detail as low-context communicators are prone to do. As for the high-context communicators, this process invites them to give their input with each round of laying down the cards, and invites them to speak if they were one of the low or high values.

Thee are other variations on this method of planning poker, such as the one taught to my company by our agile trainer, but it shares these same tactics for reining in the low-context communicators and giving permission to the high-context communicators.

Even if your company doesn’t use agile, you might want to look into planning poker or books on agile estimating and planning. Many of these techniques can be adapted, with a little creativity, to any type of group decison making endeavor.